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My Mail Disappeared!

May 7, 2004 by debbie T | Internet • Thunderbird Email

Yikes! I received one of those silly Win XP stop/dump messages right before shutting down last night, and upon re-booting this morning, I was greeted with an empty Thunderbird mail box. Don’t know if it was just coincidence, but I was in a panic! I did have a backup from a couple of days ago, but it would be a pain to retreive a few emails that were not included.

I took a look at my profile, and low and behold, all my folders seemed to be still intact, so I did some investigating and found this helpful web page. I believe I had a corrupt pref.js file because after I replaced my file, my files were back!

Hurray!

The morel of the story: ALWAYS ALWAYS backup your thunderbird files, and if you can create an extra back-up email address on your web account, do it! I have copies of all my emails forwarded to a backup account for two of my busiest email addresses. That way, if something goes wrong, I have copies online. Just make sure to delete the messages often, or they will be wasting space.

Additional Note: I just realized my address book is missing a lot of addresses. Thank God I keep backups of my addresses! I hope I can fix it.

Update on Address Book: I believe because the prefs.js file didn’t include my new address folders, it wasn’t recognizing them. I replaced the prefs.js file I had in my back up and all seems to be well again.

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